Books – Page 23

Heartbreak, by Florence Williams

Heartbreak, by Florence Williams (W.W. Norton & Co., 279 pages)

Like termites and prairie voles, human beings seem made for monogamy or, to be precise, “pair-bonding.” We are among the 2 to 10 percent of animals who organize their lives in pairs, even if there is some occasional straying involved. (Even more remarkably, about 90 percent of birds have lifelong mates.)

But bereavement happens, either in death or divorce, and as the Irish rock band The Script told us, when a heart breaks, it don’t break even. That was the experience of journalist Florence Williams, whose 2017 book The Nature Fix explored why being outdoors makes us happier and healthier. Her new book is a “personal and scientific journey” into why breakups hurt so much, and while she’s primarily talking about divorce, the science also applies to grief over the death of a loved one.

Between 10 and 15 percent of divorced and bereaved people experience a debilitating inability to get past their heartbreak, a condition known as bereavement disorder or complicated grief. Williams doesn’t put herself into that category, but she was devastated when her husband of 25 years announced that he was moving out to find his soulmate when she was 50.

While she was able to function well enough, taking care of her children and continuing her work, she was shocked at the depth of her pain. She stopped eating and lost 20 pounds. “I felt power-washed by sadness and anxiety. I looked like a stray animal who was trying to paw her way out of a kill-shelter,” she writes.

Trying to understand why it was so difficult for her to recover, Williams began doing research, interviewing therapists and researchers who study love and loss. She learned that love is as much of a survival drive as it is an emotion, and that stress hormones increase even when monogamous partners are separated for a short time. When a longtime partner vanishes forever, the loss kindles ancient and evolutionary responses: the loss of safety and inclusion that are necessary for our well-being, the loss of connection to extended family, the loss of resources.

Having a stable relationship is even integral to our physical health: “Scores of robust studies across different cultures have shown that married people live longer, experience fewer cancers, strokes, and heart attacks, are more likely to survive serious illnesses, and are less likely to be depressed and overweight.”

Learning all this, of course, made Williams feel even worse. (“I was like, Please stop talking,” she wrote.) So she went to therapy. She gave lots of speeches. She accepted the invitation of a scientist — a divorced friend of a friend — to make out after a party under a cottonwood tree.

Here, Williams is able to show off that she is not just an able investigator and reporter, but an elegant wordsmith. She writes of that encounter with the scientist: “My hard little heart hiccuped and started to soften, along with everything else.”

Unfortunately, Williams’ first post-divorce swim in the dating pool didn’t end well, for deeply uncomfortable reasons, and her continued contact with this man may cause the reader to question her judgment. So, too, her inability to keep up with small things in the aftermath of her husband’s leaving. (She drove for months with an expired car registration, she admits.)

But an even harder reality arrives when Williams’ continued weight loss is finally diagnosed as Type 1 diabetes, which is most commonly diagnosed in children. She learned that high levels of cortisol can affect the production and regulation of insulin, and inflammation markers rise with sustained stress. One researcher told her of the “cellular carnage” of heartbreak, “This is one of the hidden landmines of human existence.”

At this point, the narrative becomes a confluence of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Williams’ own The Nature Fix. She resolutely sets out to heal her heart before her heartbreak kills her, on a wilderness trip in search of awe. This wasn’t just an emotional experiment, but a scientific one: She had her blood drawn before and after the trip to see if her health measures had improved.

Williams set out looking for prescriptions to easily fix her broken heart; readers who go to this book looking for the same might be disappointed. There’s no broken-heart pill; that gold mine still awaits anyone who might invent it, and even her experiments with psychedelic drugs didn’t seem to help.

But Williams’ journey is interesting and her research solid, and anyone suffering from a heartbreak of their own might benefit from her story. Just stay away from any scientist named Ennis who wants to kiss you under a cottonwood tree. B+

Book Notes

It’s probably no surprise that a memoir released in November was near the top of the charts on Amazon last week.

The author: actor Will Smith (assisted by a co-author, Mark Manson). Last year, Oprah Winfrey called it “the best memoir I’ve ever read,” and as everyone knows, she reads a lot. I read the opening when it first came out, but just re-read the first chapter in a new light, after Will’s assault of comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards.

The opening sentences of Chapter 1: “I’ve always thought of myself as a coward. Most of my memories of my childhood involve me being afraid in some way — afraid of other kids, afraid of being hurt or embarrassed, afraid of being seen as weak.” The memoir, Will, is from Penguin Press, 432 pages.

Not taking a side here, but Chris Rock has written a book, too. It came out in 1997, and Winfrey didn’t say a word, although the first page is literally a bit about her leaving a message on his answering machine declining to feature it in her book club. Rock This! is from Hyperion, 224 pages, and also in paperback.

Meanwhile, there’s a new book out about the Academy Awards that necessarily omits the most interesting thing that’s happened in years, as it was published in February. Best Pick (Rowman & Littlefield, 332 pages) has three authors: John Dorney, Jessica Regan and Tom Salinsky. They take us on a history of Oscars beginning in the 1920s, with close-ups of the best pictures and the authors weighing in on whether the Oscar was deserved. Looks like a winner.

If you care nothing about film and would rather be outdoors, you might be interested in Riverman, An American Odyssey (Deckle Edge, 272 pages) by Ben McGrath. It’s about the life of Dick Conant, a folk hero who traversed the country’s rivers alone in a canoe before disappearing in North Carolina while he was on his way from New York to Florida. McGrath has written about Conant before in The New Yorker; he expounds on those stories to fill in the details of Conant’s life, if not his death, which remains a mystery.

Book Events

Author events

• MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD Author presents The Great Circle. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 6 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BRANDON K. GAUTHIER Author presents Before Evil: Young Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Kim. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., April 27, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

• MERRIMACK VALLEY WRITERS’ GROUP All published and unpublished local writers who are interested in sharing their work with other writers and giving and receiving constructive feedback are invited to join. The group meets regularly; the next meeting is scheduled for Tues., April 5, from 5 to 7:15 p.m., and will be held virtually over WebEx Meetings. To reserve your spot, email [email protected].

Writer submissions

• UNDER THE MADNESS Magazine designed and managed by an editorial board of New Hampshire teens under the mentorship of New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary. features creative writing by teens ages 13 to 19 from all over the world, including poetry and short fiction and creative nonfiction. Published monthly. Submissions must be written in or translated into English and must be previously unpublished. Visit underthemadnessmagazine.com for full submission guidelines.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. 844 Elm St., Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

What Happened to the Bennetts, by Lisa Scottoline

What Happened to the Bennetts, by Lisa Scottoline (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages)

Most people have heard of the federal witness protection program; far fewer have ever actually given it any serious thought. Those who have might know its acronym, WITSEC for witness security, and that it is a program of the U.S. Marshals Service that gives new identities to people who testify against criminals who have networks that enable them to retaliate.

According to the government’s website, more than 19,000 people have taken part in the program since its formation some 50 years ago. That includes not just people who testify but also any dependents who might be in danger.

Lisa Scottoline dives into this world with her new novel, which probes the hellscape one family endures after a violent carjacking. Up until this point, Jason and Lucinda Bennett had enjoyed a comfortable suburban life — replete with a Mercedes sedan, two nice teens and a small white dog with two speeds: “asleep and annoying.” But driving home after their daughter’s field hockey game, they were cut off by two men, which started a cascade of horrific events that led up to FBI agents banging on their door later that night.

The agents informed the already reeling family that they were in imminent danger because they had witnessed one of the carjackers shoot the other. They had 15 minutes to decide whether to enter the witness security program or to stay home and risk their own deaths.

That in itself is worth some reflection. Many people have thought through what they would take to leave their house for an emergency, such as a wildfire or hurricane; that’s why “bug out” bags are a thing. But this wasn’t just bugging out. The Bennetts had 15 minutes to gather belongings with the realization that they were never coming back, and in fact, they would never even be “the Bennetts” anymore after they left. Moreover, they weren’t allowed to tell anyone they were leaving — not Jason’s employees, not Lucinda’s friends or even her mother, who lived in a nursing home for the memory impaired.

As such, it wasn’t quite as easy a decision as it seemed.

The Bennetts do leave, however, and that’s not a spoiler; the title tells us as much. And although they are not allowed to go to their social media accounts on the new laptops the U.S. taxpayers give them, Lucinda uses an old account to see what’s being said about their disappearance. This makes it even harder, of course, seeing a thread called “What happened to the Bennetts” and a search being organized by citizen investigators, much like what happened in the real-life case of Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie last year.

Moreover, by seeing what was said on the internet, the couple can see the rampant speculation that is taking place, such as whether Jason killed his family and then burned down the house and his office.

All this is fascinating enough, but eventually the story turns into a more conventional crime novel, enabled because Jason, as a court reporter, knows how to read lips, and learns something about the criminal he is hiding from that he wasn’t supposed to know.

From there the story accelerates, going back and forth between Jason’s quest for justice and the frenzied search for answers within the community they left behind.

It would be a mistake to call this a nail-biter; the novel is not as accomplished as that, although it certainly qualifies as a run-of-the-mill thriller. Scottoline, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, has somehow found the time to write 32 novels in addition to non-fiction books of humor, including Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog. She also writes humor with her daughter, Francesca Serritella.

There’s little humor in this story, however, and in fact, the opening sequence of events will be disturbing to anyone who is a parent. It’s an emotional haul for the reader to move past what happens to fully embrace the thriller mode.

What Happened to the Bennetts is being praised by some as Scottoline’s best novel yet, which does not make me want to rush to get the others. It’s an excellent beach read, a few months early and a hundred pages too long. B-

Book Notes

Looking for new releases in gardening, I came across a term I hadn’t heard before: survival gardening. Apparently, this is a subset of doomsday prepping that has been a thing since long before Joe Biden warned us that Ukraine-related food shortages are coming.

`Until the seed shortage hits, you might be interested in some more traditional titles as we wait for the growing season to start. Out this month is Gardening for Everyone (Harvest, 304 pages) by sustainability expert Julia Watkins, who focuses on vegetables, fruits and herbs.

If you’re more into flowers, there’s Garden Maker (Harvest House, 208 pages) by Christie Purifoy. The Healing Gardenby Juliet Blankespoor is out this week (Harvest Press, 448 pages) and is a comprehensive guide to growing therapeutic plants. Next week comes Containers in the Garden (Cool Springs Press, 176 pages) by “celebrity gardener” Claus Dalby, who is apparently the Scandinavian Martha Stewart.

But for sheer reading enjoyment about gardens with none of the actual work, look for Marta McDowell’s Unearthing the Secret Garden (Timber Press, 320 pages), which explores the life and gardening history of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of the beloved children’s classic.

The opening: “Can a book be a horticultural trigger? A sort of gateway drug for gardeners? If so, then surely The Secret Garden by Franches Hodgson Burnett is a contender.”

McDowell, who teaches at the New York Botanical Garden, has also written horticultural histories of sorts about other writers, to include Emily Dickinson and Beatrix Potter, is the author of 2016’s All the Presidents’ Gardens (Timber Press, 336 pages), a history of White House gardens — “from Madison’s cabbages to Kennedy’s roses” — that sounds infinitely more interesting than foraging for seeds. — Jennifer Graham

Book Events

Author events

• AN EVENING TO REMEMBER: CONVERSATIONS WITH CONCORD-AREA AUTHORS Authors Margaret Porter, Virginia MacGregor (Nina Monroe), Paul Brogan and Mark Okrant, in conversation with NHPR’s Laura Knoy. Presented by The Duprey Companies. Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., April 6, 7:30 p.m. Free to attend. Visit ccanh.com.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Writers groups

Writer submissions

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, by Bob Odenkirk

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, by Bob Odenkirk (Random House, 285 pages)

It’s hard to imagine now, but in its first season, the AMC drama Breaking Bad didn’t make much of a splash. In fact, when his agent first brought up a potential short-term gig playing a sleazy lawyer named Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk had not seen the show.

“I vaguely recalled the image on the billboards — a guy in his underwear in the desert?” He figured, “I would phone a friend, see if anyone had actually seen it,” Odenkirk writes in his new memoir.

Breaking Bad, of course, would go on to be a monster hit and make household names out of Odenkirk and several of his costars. And the show’s success eclipsed the work he’d been doing since he was in middle school. (“By age twenty, I’d been steadily pumping out the blithering idiocy for over a decade,” he writes.) What he wanted to do, what he’d always done, was make people laugh, and he had been (mostly) paying his bills by writing jokes and sketches, going from the famed comedy stages in Chicago to the set of Saturday Night Live.

Saul Goodman, of course, is in many ways a comical character, although he exists within a serious and often violent drama. So maybe Odenkirk’s transition from stand-up wasn’t as big a transition as, say, playing the butler in The Remains of The Day, but it’s surprising enough to sustain a 200-plus-page book, at least for Breaking Bad fans. Those who have no interest in the show or its spinoff would have a tougher time paying attention unless they are young people looking to get into comedy.

The book, of course, begins with a joke:

“How does one begin a book? … Dickens, Melville, Odenkirk — all have faced the same query, and only one has failed. Melville. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Talk about giving up.”

He goes on to riff about a childhood in Naperville, Illinois, that was most likely more painful than described. “A tale as old as time. Daddy issues. The end,” he jokes. Odenkirk was one of seven children in a Catholic family headed by a man with anger issues, so to speak. “Generally speaking, my dad was rough and too intense, and those were his good qualities. He was never around, and when he was, there was tension in the air.”

Odenkirk was relieved when his parents split up when he was 15; he says he shrugged when his father died when he was 22. His salvation was his brothers and sisters, encouraging teachers and, most importantly, discovering Monty Python, the British comedy troupe. Their comedy taught him that much of the world and many of its people were pretty awful “and you don’t have to respect these people, you can laugh at them.”

He mowed lawns in order to save enough money to buy a cassette recorder from Kmart (Google both of them, kids), on which he recorded comedy bits and interviews, but he couldn’t really envision doing comedy for a living until he was in college and had a chance encounter with Del Close, a legend in Chicago’s comedy scene. On impulse, Odenkirk asked if he could interview Close, “a gnarled, shaggy Sasquatch of a man,” and got two and a half hours of rambling memories, confessions, inspiration and advice. “All I can say is that it drew me in and shook me by the collar and screamed in my face, ‘YOU CAN DO THIS! THIS IS GONNA BE GREAT! I trembled in the presence of his galloping mind.”

From there, Odenkirk describes the ins and outs of his early career as a comedian and writer, including a trying time as a writer at SNL, which was then in its 13th season, working with people such as Al Franken and Chris Farley. It’s a revelatory in that he describes how what seems to be a dream job can actually wreck even someone with talent. (And it’s clear Odenkirk had talent — I am still laughing over a sketch he pitched about a cheap airline called “Greyhound Air” that doesn’t promise destinations but vague directions: “the plane is headed in a general direction … like towards New York.”)

It’s interesting that Breaking Bad doesn’t show up in the memoir in any real way until the ninth chapter, some 200 pages in. It shows how so many people in Hollywood can define a person by a single series or film, despite a robust body of work that precedes or follows it. And Breaking Bad, of course, gave birth to the prequel that Odenkirk is still immersed in: Better Call Saul, which he calls “the biggest break of my career by a fair margin.”

But here’s one of Odenkirk’s more interesting reveals: He initially said no to the role, because it was going to be shot in Albuquerque. He and his wife/manager had two kids, he was a school volunteer and a soccer coach, and a raft of other reasons, including that he felt he was famous and successful enough. “I am in this to entertain myself. Here’s how much fame I need: ‘just enough’ and no more.”

Maybe that’s the secret to Hollywood success: not really caring about it. Odenkirk concedes that his own success has in some ways been driven by luck. (He tells a young woman seeking advice, “You can’t make your own break.”) But it’s hard to look over Odenkirk’s life and not recall the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” With enough raw talent and a cheap tape recorder, it’s apparently enough to just want to entertain yourself.

Book Notes

The literary genre known as autofiction is a blending of fiction and autobiography, and not everyone accepts it as necessary. “It’s either memoir or fiction. There’s no such category as autofiction,” writing coach Brooke Warner argued in Publishers Weekly last year.

The industry begs to differ, as perhaps would authors of centuries past. Let’s just say Charles Dickens’ fiction likely would have been much different had he not grown up in his own bleak house.

The latest buzz in the realm of autofiction is Checkout 19 (Riverhead, 288 pages) by Claire-Louise Bennett, a novel published in the U.K. last year and released this month in the U.S.

It is, as much as I can tell from reading excerpts and reviews, a stream-of-consciousness novel about books and their effects on the narrator’s life. But the opening will draw in anyone who, like the narrator, would go to the public library as a child and emerge with a stack of books they could barely see over.

It’s better, Bennett’s narrator, says, to just pick one book, rather than to be distracted by the siren songs of 10 others all week: “[J]ust because we were allowed to take out six books eight books twelve books four books didn’t mean did it that we had to.”

That could be autofiction for many of us.

Meanwhile, one has to marvel at the timing of Vladimir: A Novel (Avid Reader Press, 256 pages) by Julia May Jonas, which was released a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has nothing to do with Putin, but surely benefits from people searching for books on Russia’s president. It’s about a New York college professor who develops an obsession with the titular Vladimir while her husband is under investigation for having untoward relationships with students.

Finally, Anne Tyler fans are rejoicing at this week’s release of her 24th novel, French Braid (Knopf, 256 pages), a multigenerational family story — set in Baltimore, of course.

Book Events

Author events

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari (Crown, 345 pages)

The late Harvard professor B.F. Skinner became famous for animal experiments that he believed destroyed the idea of free will. Animals can be manipulated to perform an action by repeatedly offering them a reward until their behaviors become ingrained, similar to Pavlov’s salivating dog. Humans, being animals, are basically the same as pigeons in how we respond to rewards. So when we go to Instagram or Twitter looking for “likes,” we’re the equivalent of a Skinner’s pigeon extending its left wing and expecting a treat.

That’s one of the many unsettling images British writer Johann Hari puts forth in his blistering critique of what the digital world has wrought. Researchers have been watching our attention spans shrink over the past few decades and have theorized that this is occurring not only because of the processing speed of all the digital tools we use, but also because of sheer information overload.

The average worker spends about three minutes on a task before being distracted by something else, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s an incoming text or Slack message, a call from your boss or the siren call of TikTok. After we’re interrupted, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back into a state of deep focus. This isn’t only a problem in terms of our ability to accomplish the things on our to-do list, but has more profound implications than any individual’s stress.

When our ability to pay attention deteriorates, so does our ability to solve problems, Hari says. “Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them,” he writes. (Unrelated to the book, I’ve seen commentators remark lately that America’s involvement in Ukraine will only last as long as Twitter will continue to pay attention to what Russia is doing there.)

For Hari, the societal decline in focus became personal and urgent when he took his godson, a high-school dropout who was obsessed with screens, to visit Elvis Presley’s estate, Graceland. While this was supposed to be a trip of human connection, they were given iPads and earbuds to use while walking around. Hari watched as a couple got obsessed with looking at the images of Presley’s “Jungle Room” on the iPad — while they were standing in the Jungle Room. In a darkly funny moment, he told them, “There’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the Jungle Room.”

But Hari knew that, in different ways, he was as addicted to screens as the couple he chastised, and decided to spend three months in Provincetown without any form of connection to the internet. His experience there, however, is a fraction of Stolen Focus, which is built more on research than anecdote, and as such is a damning indictment of the attention economy, tech and what it’s doing to our brains. We can’t solve it by simply throwing away our phones; Hari identifies 12 forces — which include stress, poor diets, physical and mental exhaustion and a decline in long periods of reading — that are contributing to the problem.

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns,” Hari writes.

Unfortunately, a one-day or three-month digital detox does not solve the problem, even though Hari found that without the tyranny of his smartphone, he found time to write 93,000 words of a novel and to read three volumes of War and Peace. Indeed, former Google strategist James Williams later told him that a break from tech “is not the solution for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution.”

Hari doesn’t just read the work of people like Williams, Google engineer turned tech ethicist Tristan Harris, nutritionist Dale Pinnock and renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who died last year); he interviewed these men and others in person, and weaves their narratives into what ultimately is a manifesto for an “attention rebellion.”

The steps he outlines that can help may seem overly simple and ineffective, given the enormousness of the problem, but maybe that’s the point. If they were too daunting, we wouldn’t even try. Among the changes Hari has made in his own life: taking action (which he calls pre-commitment) to cut down on distractions before they can occur; taking periodic breaks from social media; building in unstructured “flow” time to let his mind wander and thus make creative connections; and being obsessive about getting enough sleep. He estimates that he’s improved his own focus by 15 to 20 percent, not a huge amount, but enough to make a difference in the quality of his life.

Stolen Focus is not a self-help book, not a cultural critique, but something even more important: an education. Read it, and you will be forced to evaluate the role of technology in your life, and that little bird on Twitter may forever look like one of B.F. Skinner’s pigeons; a reminder, in the immortal words of children’s book author Mo Willems: Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus. A

Book Notes

America’s shrinking attention span is a problem of such scale that it requires more than one book to address it. In addition to Johann Hari’s excellent Stolen Focus, reviewed this week, there are two other new books that provide variations on the theme:

In Peak Mind (HarperOne, 368 pages) Amishi Jha promises we can find our focus and “own our attention” in 12 minutes a day. (Seems a lot of pages for a 12-minute strategy, but OK.) And Bob Goff weighs in on the subject with Distracted (Thomas Nelson, 256 pages), in which he makes the case for living like a racehorse wearing blinders to focus on the most important stuff.

Otherwise, here are two new nonfiction books worth your attention:

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni is out with The Beauty of Dusk (Avid Reader Press, 320 pages), a reflection on how his life changed when he woke one morning with changed vision and fuzzy thinking, which he eventually found out was the result of a stroke he’d had during the night. The excerpts I’ve read so far are compelling.

For another look at lives suddenly changed, check out Amy Bloom’s In Love (Random House, 240 pages), which examines the fraught subject of medically assisted suicide — not when a person has a terminal diagnosis and six months or less to live, as allowed in some states in the U.S., but when the person still has a decent quality of life and a longer expected life span.

Bloom’s husband was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and wanted to die on his own terms, not the disease’s, so the couple sought the help of Dignitas, a nonprofit in Zurich that helps people arrange “accompanied suicide.” There is no happy ending here, but Bloom provides a thoughtful examination of a controversial issue.

Finally, in a novel described as a modern allegory in the vein of Animal Farm, Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (Viking, 416 pages) savages social media through the voices of animals living through a revolution in Zimbabwe. It’s getting great reviews, but at over 400 pages, you’ll need a good attention span to get through it. George Orwell needed only about a quarter of those pages to make his points in Animal Farm. Just sayin’.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

Poetry

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 216 pages)

In her new novel Pure Colour, Canadian Sheila Heti imagines a new Genesis, one in which God is not yet finished with the work of creation but is just taking a break, stepping back, critically looking at what he has so far produced. “This is the moment we are living in — the moment of God standing back,” Heti writes on the first page.

And that, my friends, is the last time that this novel makes sense.

From there, Heti hurtles into a book-length word salad that is at times poignant and insightful; other times, a baffling stream of consciousness. At its best, it’s an imaginative fable about love and loss, wrapped in a blistering social critique. At its worst, which happens too often, you wonder what (and how much) Heti was drinking when she wrote it. Such is speculative fiction.

We begin in a world that is “heating up in advance of its destruction” since God has decided the first draft wasn’t good enough and a new one is needed. Like any good manager, God needs feedback, so “God appears, splits, and manifests as three critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling creation in its arms.”

People are born from the eggs of these creatures (yes, even the bear produces eggs in this world), and take on the characteristics of their breeders. People born from fish eggs care most about the collective; people born of bird eggs care about things like beauty, meaning and order; people born from bear eggs care about a few other people: “They are deeply consumed with their own.”

Our protagonist, Mira, wished she was of bear lineage, but she, born of a bird, had the hollow bones and heart of an artist. We follow Mira around in her strange world, where she works at a store that sells expensive lamps. (This all occurs during an unspecified age before the internet, when people found jobs and housing from “little paper signs.” Mira goes to school at the prestigious American Academy of American Critics (which, in a wry twist, has international branches) where self-important students learn to “hone their insights” and to “develop a style of writing and thinking that could survive down through the ages, and at the same time penetrate their own generation so incisively.”

The school, it seems, could have been worth an entire cynical book, or at least a couple of chapters, but it is quickly dropped to explore a brief love relationship Mira has with an American orphan named — wait for it — Annie. Coincidence or something more? Hard to say. Then her father dies, and this strange little novel gets even stranger.

When Mira’s father dies, his essence seems to take over her body. For a while, the book turns into a meditation on grief, as Mira processes her loss. “She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.” She stopped caring about the business of living (though, frankly, it wasn’t like she was doing that much living before her father’s death). “It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store in all that sunshine. It was the dead who need to be held on to, so they would not slip away. Who would save the dead from oblivion, if not the living?”

Then, Mira has an experience in which she takes the form of a leaf — a leaf in which her father’s spirit also dwelled — and they have the sort of beautiful and cleansing Kafkaesque conversations you might have if you suddenly found yourself inside a leaf. Was she dead? It seems so for a while, then she comes out of the leaf and is back with orphan Annie for a while while musing about gods, plural, specifically gods who tired people out when they wanted to stop them from doing things. “The weariest people are being the most prevented. They are the most dangerous ones, who would change the world if they could.”

Eventually, Mira’s mind-boggling dialogue comes to a close, though we are not sure what, if anything, has been accomplished, either for Mira or for the long-suffering reader.

Still, Heti proves herself a shrewd critic of modern life, as in her observation about social media:

“There were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people. … Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see — a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.”

That said, it seems that the world would be better served if she just wrote columns of cultural criticism. Maybe we are bears, and she’s a bird, building thought nests that others can’t fully see. In Mira’s world, artists who created stories, books and movies were producing their own second drafts, better versions of God’s world, as if hoping to get his (or her) attention. For the sake of the next world, let’s hope God doesn’t option this book. C

Book Notes

One of the silver linings of the pandemic was the virtual author event.

When physical bookstores were shuttered, many took to having author readings and Q&As online, which enabled people in remote locations to participate. You couldn’t get a book signed this way or shake the author’s hand, but it was still a better way to “connect” with an author than reading an interview.

Author events have now returned live in many places, but there are some bookstores that are still enabling people to watch online. Others have posted past events on YouTube, such as Washington, D.C.,’s famous bookstore, Politics and Prose. A quick Google search may find a few videos of your favorite author that will make for a more enjoyable evening than watching NFL reruns.

Here are a couple coming up of note:

Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., will have a virtual event March 14 for How She Did It(Rodale, 336 pages), by Molly Huddle and Sara Slattery, who offer “stories, advice and secrets to success from 50 legendary distance runners.”

Mystery writer Simone St. James has a new novel, The Book of Cold Cases (Berkley, 352 pages), for which she’s doing a virtual event March 17 through the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona.

Novelist Lisa Scottoline doesn’t release What Happened to the Bennetts (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages) until March 29 but is already doing events. One virtual one will be through Friend and Fiction on Facebook Live on March 23.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk has a new book, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama (Random House, 304 pages), for which he’s doing both live and virtual events. He’s got a virtual event March 13 through Live Talks Los Angeles. It’ll cost you $40 to get admitted, but you also get actor Jack Black, for what that’s worth.

Book Events

Author events

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur (Simon & Schuster, 265 pages)

As television sitcoms go, The Good Place was rather remarkable. The NBC show, which premiered in 2016 and aired for four years, had all the typical goofiness of low-brow comedy but was based on high-brow ideas: What does it mean to be a good person? Why should we care? And, of all the prevailing philosophical schools of thought on the matter, which ones are true and most relevant today?

These are tough themes to take on in 30 minutes minus commercials, but Michael Schur succeeded in creating a star-making show that worked on both levels and managed to elevate relatively obscure philosophy books into the mainstream (most notably, retired Harvard professor T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other). Now Schur has written a book of his own, a summary of the ethical frameworks he studied when developing The Good Place. It is, in many ways, a sitcom of a book, as Schur applies a vaudevillian touch to topics rarely taken that lightly: among them, existentialism.

Parts have a slapstick quality that would quickly grow tiresome but for Schur’s true comic gifts and his willingness to question his own moral judgments, among them his struggle to reconcile his admiration of Woody Allen’s work with revelations of the filmmaker’s personal life.

The punchlines begin on the book’s cover, in which the title is hysterically imperfect; it leaves off the “t” in “perfect.” (The subtitle, “the correct answer to every moral question,” also reveals itself to be a joke, because Schur’s ultimate aim isn’t to answer all the big questions, but rather to give readers the framework for thinking about them, and in fact, to insist that we think about them.) They continue through the acknowledgments, in which Schur peppers his thanks to friends and colleagues with random facts. (Einstein used a $1,500 check as a bookmark, then lost the book; moose in the Western Yukon appear to have parties for each other.)

Along the way, Schur unpacks the thinking of the likes of Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, Maimonides, Aristotle, William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, all names with which any graduate of a U.S. high school should have at least a passing familiarity. He applies their ethical concepts to modern first-world dilemmas — Should I cheer for sports teams that have problematic names? Should I eat at Chick-Fil-A? Should I eat meat at all? — injecting personal anecdotes along the way, such as the angst he felt after spending $800 for a baseball bat autographed by Red Sox players as a Christmas gift for his son.

In another story, he reveals that his interest in ethics pre-dates The Good Place by at least a decade. In 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, Schur’s then fiance (now wife) had a fender bender that resulted in an $836 claim, despite the fact that the claimant’s bumper was barely scratched and the responding police officer said there was no damage. Schur was furious and offered to donate $836 to Katrina relief if the man would drop the claim and continue to live with the indignity of having a scratch on his bumper.

While the man was thinking it over, Schur took his outrage to the internet and raised $20,000 in pledges for Katrina relief if the bumper went unreplaced. “I had dreams of rescuing New Orleans all by myself, armed with nothing but a keyboard and a brilliant masterstroke of moral reasoning,” he wrote. “And then I started to feel sick.”

The “chirpings” of conscience began to nag at Schur and his fiance, and he started consulting ethics books and philosophy professors about why his actions felt wrong and what he should do. While he still believed that the other driver was wrong to insist on replacing a barely scratched bumper, he came to believe that he was also wrong to subject the man to public shaming even if an auxiliary outcome (Katrina relief) was good. This experience led Schur into the rabbit hole of ethics that resulted in The Good Place and ultimately this book.

In 2019, Schur was asked to write the introduction to the re-release of controversial ethicist Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, and he wrote of it, “More important than what you feel when you read this book is what you will not feel: complacency. You will not feel like other people don’t matter.”

The same can be said of Schur’s book, which may seem superficial (2,500 years of complex moral philosophy condensed into 265 pages — with jokes!) but in fact achieves the author’s aim: to get us to think consciously about the mass of decisions that comprise our days, and to consider the ideas that could help us choose more wisely. Not because we think this might get us to a “good place” — this is a secular book, as was the show — but because, as Harvard’s Scanlon said, this is something that we owe each other.

B+

Book Notes

Some people choose books to read because they like the author; others, because they like the premise of the book. But have you ever chosen a book based on something the author said?

That happened to me this week when I read an interview with Brendan Slocumb, the author of the new novel The Violin Conspiracy (Anchor, 352 pages). I’d seen the book mentioned before, but it didn’t catch my attention until I read in Publishers Weekly that Slocumb said, “I wanted to pull back the curtain and let everybody know this is how the sausage is made. Classical music is a very cutthroat profession, though it’s especially tough for people of color.”

Classical music a “very cutthroat profession”? Who knew? Suddenly I was interested. Slocumb, who lives in D.C., is a music educator and professional violinist who also founded a nonprofit and plays in a rock band. Yet he found the time to write a novel. Definitely worth checking out.

Other new releases of interest:

Fans of Charles Dickens will be interested in The Turning Point (Deckle Edge, 368 pages), nonfiction by Robert Douglas Fairhurst that examines how the events of one year — 1851 — changed and shaped the beloved novelist’s career.

Funny Farm (St. Martin’s Press, 256 pages) is Laura Zeleski’s memoir of “my unexpected life with 600 rescue animals” and the story of how she, a graphic designer with government contracts, fulfilled her dying mother’s dream of running a rescue.

Daniel Pink sorted through more than 15,000 self-reported regrets of people around the world and found something resembling redemption, chronicled in The Power of Regret (Riverhead, 256 pages). If nothing else, reading the regrets of others might make you feel better about your own.

And finally, this is not a new release, but worth checking out given recent world events: Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine (Anchor, 466 pages), which examines another heartbreaking part of Ukraine’s history, when Josef Stalin intentionally starved more than 3 million people in the region through sinister agricultural policies.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents new book Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents new book Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents new book The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents new book Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents new book The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Category: Books

Heartbreak, by Florence Williams

What Happened to the Bennetts, by Lisa Scottoline

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, by Bob Odenkirk

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur

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